Haha! It's still technically July!
Sorry I'm late on this...let's just cut to the case.

Hey kg, how's Skyrim CE going?
Great, actually. I am still on-track for an Open Alpha release in September, which will include most of main quest line from the beginning of the game up to slaying the dragon at Whiterun (or thereabouts). It's enough content to be able to test out nearly every feature of the engine in full and get feedback (a.k.a. bug reports) from the Alpha testers (a.k.a. you guys...if you want).

Awesome! What sort of stuff have you made progress on?
Unfortunately for the sake of presenting pretty pictures, mostly boring engine stuff and data formatting. This includes setting up the file formats for quests, dialogue, etc., expanding my current subprograms and formats for additional features (e.g. adjusting the quest format to allow for radiant quest types), and improving documentation. No new screenshots until next month (which might be next week...), sorry.

Speaking of documentation, though, I made a GitHub Page for it! It's not at all complete, but I plan for the site to be the place for designing/reserving mods, submitting bug reports, and releasing the full game and its DLC (along with the upload here on Cemetech and elsewhere (see store for details)).

The website also includes a summary of current progress using fancy HTML progress bars (they're not very fancy), which I'll update periodically. I'll also get around to including some formal changelogs once the game approaches a publishable form, as well as development credits.

Cool! Anything else you want to mention?
Yes. I gave up on my shitty "unique" text-compression technique from the last post. It was...convoluted to say the least, and a waste of time overall. I've instead swapped over to modified LZSS compression, which gave room for more characters (things like arrows for signs and stuff) as well as Str substitution flags (i.e. "Go speak with *Str0* in Whiterun."). This, along with some improvements in dialogue storage, should make dialogue much smaller (yay).

I also remembered that data lists can hold a few extra bytes of info per line using the signs of its real and imaginary parts. I don't know how I forgot about that, but it has already found good use.

Oh, and I'm still in a rut when it comes to battling and magic and all that. I'd hate to "hard-code" the spells so to speak, but it might be the only way to account for their diverse effects. Enchantments too, maybe. If you have any suggestions about this (I know its vague; I'm happy to answer more specific questions about my current implementation choices), please leave them below; I'd hate to make additional spells and stuff out of reach for modders.

That it for now?
Yup. I'll see you all in a week or two. I return to university near the end of August, at which point my free time will plummet but my work ethic will skyrocket. I'll try to be more productive than I was last year (i.e. more than none). Ciao.

Oh, and the for the included poll, I ask mainly to see which cities people would get mad about if I didn't design them perfectly. I'm totally not trying to reduce the amount of effort I need to put in my content.../s

Have your own thoughts to add to this or any other topic? Want to ask a question, offer a suggestion, share your own programs and projects, upload a file to the file archives, get help with calculator and computer programming, or simply chat with like-minded coders and tech and calculator enthusiasts via the site-wide AJAX SAX widget? Registration for a free Cemetech account only takes a minute.